“American crocodiles are recovering in Florida, thanks in part to a thriving nesting ground in the cooling canals of the Turkey Point nuclear plant, where biologists recorded more than 600 hatchlings this summer. The Florida population, once down to just a few hundred animals, now numbers around 2,000 statewide and is spreading back into its old territory,” reports The Doomslayer.
BioGraphic explains:
Back in the era of disco, cocaine cowboys, and Dallas, however, there were no crocodile-filled waters in Florida. In the late 1970s, the University of Florida’s Mazzotti started his doctoral dissertation on the American crocodile. Over the course of four years, searching South Florida’s waterways three or four nights a week, he caught just 31 non-hatchling crocodiles.
But hope lurked in the shadows of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant—that towering symbol of modernity, built to air-condition the homes that had led to the crocodiles’ demise. In 1978, a staffer there stumbled upon a clutch of eggs. As it turned out, the 270 linear kilometers (168 miles) of cooling canals Turkey Point relied on to condense steam and produce energy also provided an ideal habitat for crocodiles…
In 2025: It’s been a historic season for crocodile hatchlings, Lloret says. His group collected 606 tiny crocodiles from an estimated 30 nests—the first time in the program’s 47 years that Turkey Point surpassed 600 hatchlings…
Lloret’s numbers support a positive overall trend for crocodiles in South Florida. This year, Mazzotti’s Croc Docs team, which monitors hatchlings outside of Turkey Point, located 178 nests, including one on Sanibel Island and four by the Marco Island Executive Airport. They found the majority of their nests, however, near Flamingo in the southern reaches of Everglades National Park. In 1986, biologists found a single nest in the area; in 2025, there were 129.
Crocodiles have even started to reclaim parts of their native range—and, in some cases, edge past it, as the planet warms and mangroves spread north. A crocodile born and microchipped in Turkey Point, for instance, was discovered in Tampa. “Crocodiles are on the move,” Mazzotti says. “The population is increasing, and they are starting to disperse.”
The FWC estimates at least 2,000 crocodiles now live in the state.
Crocodiles are also flourishing in northern Australia after nearly disappearing from Australia in the 1970s. Now, there are over 100,000 of them, growing up to 20 feet long and some weighing more than 2,200 pounds. They “hunt along the coasts, rivers and wetlands of the continent’s far north.”
